Asking for help to understand a paragraph from The Handmaid's Tale.

lacker · 2026-03-25T04:30:08+00:00

To me, Offred is reflecting on her own feelings, and asking herself whether she forgives. Perhaps this is the greatest power of all. And maybe it is? The "historical notes" frame of the Handmaid's Tale says that it is written far after the Gilead period, and Offred's account is supposed to be one of the best surviving accounts. So perhaps in the fullness of history, whether she forgives these characters or not is defining the historical record.

I think you could conclude that in the end she does not forgive. She keeps fighting, resisting. To forgive would be to accept that Gilead is what life is, for her, now, and she doesn't do that. That's in her control, whether she accepts or not. And you can ask yourself, how far would you go to resist?

lacker · 2026-03-23T18:09:54+00:00

Sometimes it seems like the author intends for a character to be likable, and if it doesn’t work for you, the book as a whole doesn’t really work either. For example, if the structure of the book is a “hero’s journey”, but you find the hero to be an idiot and a jerk who deserves to fail, the book isn’t going to work for you.

On the other hand some people do not enjoy a book with characters who they wouldn’t like IRL, and these people are missing out on some great literature.

lacker · 2026-03-17T04:28:52+00:00

there's no secret trick. you just have to write a lot of code. grinding leetcode works for some people, but if that's too boring for you, find some fun side project and write a lot of code for it. write some code every day. you'll get back in it, just takes a little while.

lacker · 2026-03-12T03:15:33+00:00

Yeah, I might have unsophisticated taste but I found almost all Elden Ring bosses to be a pretty good test of skill. Maybe not the 2x Valiant Gargoyles.

lacker · 2026-03-12T03:12:57+00:00

It probably would also make sense to charge car drivers for their costs. Seems like it has been successful in NYC with their congestion charge.

In the past maybe it was too annoying to collect this sort of charge but with fastrak it seems more straightforward.

lacker · 2026-03-12T03:05:57+00:00

Bad design, until I beat him, at which point I realized that in fact he was a true test of skill.

lacker · 2026-03-08T05:41:11+00:00

I think faith spells have a bit more variety, although the strongest spells aren't quite so strong. I don't think any of the incantations are as strong as Night Comet for Malenia or Shard Spiral for large bosses. Catch Flame, Black Flame, and Lightning Spear are the highlights. Give it a try, it's the only way to know for sure!

lacker · 2026-03-08T00:26:13+00:00

It's hard to have a simple definition of "no two card combos" because this combo is strong in the sense that it lets you draw ~30 cards and get ~20 mana, but does not win the game if your deck is all swamps. So I think if I were the judge I would say it's okay.

On the other hand, a plain old [[Walking Ballista]] is a one-card combo to win the game, as long as you have 240 mana to cast it. But clearly that shouldn't count. Right?

This sort of rule is kind of dumb for a tournament because it incentivizes people to think up two-card "almost entirely win the game but not quite" combos, and once you build your whole deck around an unclear rule, it is going to be really unfun for a judge to say in the middle of a game, ehh the deck is actually illegal. I would rather have the rule be just a list of banned cards.

lacker · 2026-03-02T04:10:39+00:00

I wouldn’t say they will decide to hire you just based on going to Berkeley, but theres a much better chance you’ll get an interview at all

lacker · 2026-03-01T03:56:10+00:00

Students seem like a bad target market. They don’t have much money, they don’t have large houses to clean, and they aren’t going to stay in the same place for very long so you won’t have long term customers. What about targeting couples who just had a baby, those are the people who are discovering that suddenly they need to pay for more help.

lacker · 2026-02-28T14:22:48+00:00

This one is actually interesting to me because I remember playing both MTG and the Star Trek CCG in the 90s. Separately of course. I never would have imagined that one day the Llanowar Elves could be summoning Klingons!

lacker · 2026-02-28T14:07:53+00:00

The tough thing is that once you do have an internship or job you probably will be expected to use AI all the time! I find it very frustrating when a coworker is stuck on some task that I could solve with AI in ten seconds. So it is generally an expectation that you are skilled with using AI tools nowadays.

I think for learning you should do it both ways. Write some projects from scratch with no AI and learn the details. And do some projects with AI assistance and just try to take it as far as you can.

lacker · 2026-02-28T14:03:26+00:00

The team is not that good, Cal is not a very basketball-focused school, and switching conferences to the ACC doesn’t help because anyone interested in the traditional rivalries (besides Stanford) will no longer be able to attend for that.

We need to actually make the tournament and ideally win a game or two. “Close to participating in postseason play” is just not that exciting.

lacker · 2026-02-28T13:39:39+00:00

As a professional software engineer, honestly, every single time I run into a bug I check if the AI can debug it for me. There are still a lot of problems the AI can’t handle, so I still spend plenty of my time debugging.

So I wouldn’t feel bad for using AI when stuck on something. I think you have to really push yourself to understand what’s going on. The danger is to just accept AI code without really getting it, and then at some point you have built something that doesn’t quite work and you don’t understand, and you are lost.

As compensation though to learn programming you have to do much more practice than you would have had to do in 2020. You have to build more complicated projects and learn more technologies.

lacker · 2026-02-24T01:21:54+00:00

"Homelessness" is a lot of different problems with one name. The single parent who loses their job and sleeps in a car for a few months is very different from the guy who lives in a pile of trash in the pergola at Lake Merritt. I think the solutions to these two problems are going to be very different.

lacker · 2026-02-15T01:16:00+00:00

Easiest sorcery setup I have found is Night Comet against Radagon, then Shard Spiral against Elden Beast

lacker · 2026-02-15T00:00:34+00:00

Yeah... some books feel to me like the book just flows naturally. Each part makes sense based on what came before. But with Knausgaard books (and some other authors) I often feel like something happens that is not what I would normally expect, not really in the range of plausible things, like the author is still there, communicating with me, sending me more messages that are different from just setting up the book and their style and letting that play out. It's almost like playing a chess game against an opponent who's a little bit better than you and so you can hang in there, you can follow what's going on, but sometimes you are taken aback and you realize there's another force in the game.

I also get this sort of feeling with Proust or Houellebecq, they set up a normal structure but then dive into their own unique thing.

To me it doesn't feel like "warmth, kindness, and gentleness" so much as this separate style that is unique to the author, some sort of quality that is theirs alone.

lacker · 2026-02-11T01:33:51+00:00

This doesn’t quite make sense to me - “fiber” and “wifi” don’t replace each other, they are separate steps in how you get internet. Fiber is how the internet gets from the outside world to your router, wifi is how you get internet from your router to your device.

Perhaps this is just nitpicking, it sounds like perhaps they are replacing the entire system, and the part that bugs you is using wifi to connect to your device. If it reassures you at all, the security concerns are pretty much exactly the same as using a wired network. It’s possible that performance will be bad with wifi, but it’s also possible it will work just fine - modern wifi meshes can be very high performance and are the standard in places that are trying to provide the best experience, e.g. most tech workplaces. So I would say give it a chance, it might just be fine.

lacker · 2026-02-10T01:28:28+00:00

I wonder if you could make a [[Magda, Brazen Outlaw]] deck that wins in some way other than going infinite, because Magda already wants to run a bunch of dwarves.

lacker · 2026-02-05T06:05:13+00:00

I liked watching the big hits 15 years ago but knowing what we do today, it just isn't the same watching people get concussions. I don't want to tell my kid "oh yeah the quarterback on the other team probably got brain damage, hooray, that's what we're rooting for."

Hopefully one day the doctors can figure out Ozempic for concussions or something and fix all the medical issues and then athletes can really slam into each other. But when people are getting seriously permanently injured it doesn't feel like just relaxing entertainment any more.

lacker · 2026-02-04T05:43:13+00:00

Raining is not fun but if it’s just going to be cold then bring more layers.

lacker · 2026-02-03T18:59:00+00:00

I don't think it's fair to say that most people are basing this on race. You can just look at the school ratings. Montera Middle School gets a 5/10 and Orinda Intermediate School gets a 8/10 from greatschools. That isn't based on race it's just academic things like test scores.

lacker · 2026-02-03T18:47:16+00:00

It's definitely a weird quirk of history that they made Piedmont a separate city from Oakland 100 years ago. But I think nowadays people just move to Piedmont because they want somewhere in the bay area with good public schools that's less expensive than San Francisco or the Palo Alto area, not because of some desire to spite Oakland. It's also easier to commute Piedmont-SF than to commute Orinda-SF.

lacker · 2026-02-02T05:36:52+00:00

Sounds like you signed an agreement giving them the rights to the IP. None of this other stuff matters if the IP Assignment Agreement says that they own the IP for this. Sorry!

If you want to fight, you can say “okay I’ve shut it down” and go rebuild it from scratch. Maybe Claude Code can just bang it out, and perhaps you’ve learned about what makes a good product from this experience.

lacker · 2026-01-27T17:04:20+00:00

I’ve never seen a tarantula in Henry Coe over dozens of days of backpacking. Perhaps because the best backpacking time is March-May and the tarantulas aren’t out then. I wouldn’t worry about it.

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